The last several months have been a roll with several customers, channel partner and technology partner engagements. With the ACI starter kits and lab bundles shipping, customers can bring this solution into their labs and subsequently into their production Pods with the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and the Nexus switching platforms. We see a healthy interest in these kits with customers as they explore its SDN capabilities. Several ecosystem partners like F5 and Citrix have started to ship device packages. We just came off a company wide sales conference at Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago that was hugely energizing. Policy as a means to drive automation, security and scale is now the major focus area for SDN as outlined originally by Cisco as more industry vendors now endorse the vision as evidenced by initiatives like OpenStack Congress. Investment protection continues to be a major Overall the new fiscal year promises to be an exciting one.

Soni Jiandani on SDN Central – Click for Q&A

Following up on the Unleashing IT magazine (ACI special edition) released last month, I wanted to share the momentum we’re experiencing with customers and partners as the acceleration continues. As John Chambers had outlined during the last earnings call, the adoption rate has been off to a tremendous start with some of the customers and partners featured in the video above.

We also continue to take the opportunity to answer questions as the vision around ACI continues to crystallize and rapidly evolves from concept to hard reality. This week we took the opportunity to have a Q&A session with SDN central. Soni Jiandani, SVP of Insieme Networks Business Unit at Cisco led the conversation. The featured interview can be accessed here. Soni crisply articulates the ACI value proposition while addressing some of the top of mind questions that come from the media.

Gartner has released their 2014 Magic Quadrant for Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure. For the 3rd year in a row, Cisco is recognized as a leader in both vision and execution. We believe this Gartner recognition is validation of Cisco strategy and investments for unified access, policy management and cloud managed solutions.

Cisco’s position in the Wired and Wireless Gartner MQs has been consistent over the past 3 years as the market landscape has shifted we believe validating our commitment to meeting shifting customer priorities and requirements.

“With limited growth in IT resources, administrators require one network management application, one access security solution, one guest access application or one policy enforcement solution with the flexibility to be deployed in a public cloud, private cloud or on-premises. This integration reduces the costs associated with the upfront capital expense of multiple network service applications each dedicated to either the wired infrastructure or the wireless or cloud components. This savings is also extended to the ongoing software maintenance costs of all access layer management, security and policy enforcement components.”

We’ve been hearing from some of our customers that they are interested in using Cisco Meraki in their branches alongside their Cisco infrastructure in their main offices, but were worried about having to deal with too many segregated policy management systems.

Good news: Interoperability between Cisco Meraki and ISE is here. Administrators can now define a single user access policy across on-premise and cloud-managed networks.With this interoperability, Cisco infrastructure customers can now deploy Cisco Meraki in their branches in the same network as other Cisco equipment, with all devices across the network managed under ISE for unified access policy management.

Read more about the Cisco Meraki and ISE interoperability in the blog post: Got ISE?

To get a free Meraki wireless access point and learn more about the solution, join one of our online webinars. See the complete schedule and choose from a range of webinars featuring Meraki customers, product and solution overviews, and topics like BYOD.

Organizations are moving from just dealing with bring your own device (BYOD) and the influx of mobile devices to proactively developing solutions that use the full power of mobility. Because of the complexities and fluid technology horizon, this is often simpler said than done. Now you can simplify and accelerate your mobility projects by deploying a comprehensive mobility solution that has been tested and validated end to end. Read More »

Technische Universität Darmstadt, usually known as TU Darmstadt is a research university based in Germany. It was founded in 1877 and over the last 137 years has grown to be among the largest and most prestigious public universities in Germany serving over 25,000 students per year. It is the alma-mater to many world-wide leaders from Nobel prize winners, a CEO of a fortune 500 company, a president of a country and multiple World Robocup champions.

No wonder, they have a reference from Albert Einstein!

In 2009 TU Darmstadt embraced BYOD with the 5508 Series Controller managing the 1140 802.11n Access Points. Recently we talked to Thomas Vogel, the Head of Network Group and Andreas Liebe, the Network Services Manager who have over 15 years of experience managing WLAN environments. In this blog, we will describe some of the details of WLAN deployments using the 3850 Series Switch and the 5760 Series Wireless LAN Controller to address the new requirements in the school environment. Read More »

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